Google says a new URL takes about 20 hours to find and 1.5 hours to index

Most SEO teams work from guesses about how long Google takes to find a page, index it, and show the result of a change in the ranking. At the Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona, Google's Gary Illyes gave numbers. Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz reported them on 5 October, with the slides from the event.

Illyes split the data into three phases, with a typical time and a slowest time for each step. Across all three, Illyes added one caveat worth leading with: many of the steps are linked, so a delay in one compounds into the next.

Crawling

Discovering a brand-new URL takes about 20 hours typically, with "weeks to never" for the slowest cases. Refreshing a known URL takes about 30 days typically, with the same slowest band of "weeks to never". A sitemap gets processed in about 24 hours, with up to 14 days or never as the quality-dependent slowest case. A robots.txt change is picked up in about 24 hours and never later than 25 hours, which is the only step with a tight ceiling. A change to a site's crawl capacity takes 4 hours to 1 to 2 weeks typically, and 1 to 3 weeks when a site is in recovery.

Indexing

Rendering happens in seconds once a page reaches a worker, but hours in the queue is typical, and days to weeks in the slowest case. Meta-tag annotations are applied in 45 to 90 minutes typically, slowest 1 to 4 days. Link annotations are the slow step in indexing: minutes to 1 to 3 weeks typically, with months in the slowest case. End-to-end indexing takes about 1.5 hours typically, with months or never in the quality-dependent slowest case. Removing a page from the index takes 1 to 3 weeks typically and months at the slowest.

Serving

A snippet or title change shows up in the result in 1 to 2 days typically, with several weeks to months at the slowest. Removing a URL via Search Console serves in about 2 hours. Recovery from a core update is the longest shown step: 3 to 6 months typically, up to 6 months to 1 year at the slowest.

What a team does with these numbers

A page that is live but still not in the index after four days is probably in the slowest tier of discovery or rendering, which Google's own numbers put in weeks. A snippet rewrite that has not appeared after a week is probably in the slowest serving band, which Illyes gave as several weeks to months. A core-update recovery plan with a three-month target matches the typical case, and a plan built against the slowest band is a year.

For the AI side of this: Illyes's "weeks to never" bands make the point that end-to-end indexing is quality-dependent, which Google has said in other words before. The new part is a figure attached to it. The slide Schwartz published also makes sitemap.xml and robots.txt the only two files with a tight 24-hour ceiling, which is the window a crawler can safely assume before trusting that a disallow has taken effect.

Source

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, 5 October 2026, from Gary Illyes's slides at the Google Search Central Live Deep Dive in Barcelona.